Transcoding Issues: Transcoding Video Forces Transcoding Audio & Dropping HDR

Plex Players
1

Server Version#: 1.43.4.10903 (docker)
Player Version#: 10.30.8.4222 (Shield Pro)

I have plex running in a docker container and a Shield Pro hooked up to an LG OLED TV and Denon receiver.

I’ve got direct play to work really well, passing through all the right audio codecs, and HDR10/Dolby Vision showing up correctly.

I’m trying to get transcoding of AV1 working properly since the Shield Pro is old and doesn’t support it. When I play an AV1 file with 1080p HDR10 content and TrueHD audio, the server correctly transcodes the video, however:

  1. It decides to unnecessarily transcode the audio as well. TrueHD works on other files and plays fine when the video doesn’t need transcoding. How do I stop this?
  2. The transcode drops the HDR10, doing SDR tone mapping and making the picture look worse.

Is there some piece of setup that’s missing for transcoding? Why would the HDR and audio codecs get dropped just because the video needs to be transcoded?

Working file:

Screenshot 2026-09-06 at 1.20.07 AM
Screenshot 2026-09-06 at 1.20.07 AM554×222 18.9 KB

AV1 file:

Screenshot 2026-09-06 at 1.20.36 AM
Screenshot 2026-09-06 at 1.20.36 AM552×338 27.3 KB

2

H264 doesn’t support HDR, so it’s dropped of course.

Switch your transcoder to HEVC, that should preserve HDR.

And disabling the subtitles may prevent the audio from being transcoded

3

Thanks for the info!

I had to turn on hardware acceleration to see the HEVC option, but even with it turned on, H264 persisted as the output.

Disabling the subtitles did not get the audio to direct play, unfortunately.

4

For this to work, your server hardware needs to have support for hardware transcoding and hardware encoding to HEVC in HDR with 10-bit color.
And even then, your Docker config needs to properly pass through this ability into the Plex container.
Even if both of the above are given, you might need to have to stop playback and restart it. Enabling it will not magically transform an already-active playback session into HEVC.